Saw Inherent Vice last weekend; this is P.T. Anderson's two-and-a-half-hour long adaptation of the eponymous novel by Thomas Pynchon, which is set in So-Cal in 1970, and follows the half-hearted, half-awake ex-cop turned hippie PI Larry "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) as he somnambulantly pursues several different cases that he apparently takes ( Read more... )

Really not feelin' the love for Jerry Cornelius.

I've an ambivalent relationship with Michael Moorcock's work: yes, I recognize how fraggin' seminal it is to science fiction and fantasy, I realize that he's a prime exponent of the British New Wave in science fiction, and any self-respecting, self-described geek, especially one with even a casual ( Read more... )

From Saturday, 10 May through Thursday, 14 May, I read W. Somerset Maugham's The Magician (originally published in 1908 by Heinemann (London) and in 1909 by Duffield and Company; but I read it in a Project Gutenberg edition in OverDrive Media Console on my Kindle Fire [the Project Gutenberg edition included Maugham's introductory "A Fragment of ( Read more... )

I began reading James Morrow's Towing Jehovah (NY: Harvest Books [Harcourt, Inc.]; 1994; 1995 trade paperback edition; ISBN: 0-15-600210-8; 384 pps.) on Saturday, 3 January 2009, but I officially abandoned it on Sunday, 29 September 2013, after stalling out around 200-odd pages.

( Read more... )

I've been gradually picking my way through Warren Ellis's and Darick Robertson's much-ballyhooed Transmetropolitan series as my whims and the vagaries of the inter-library lending network permit; I think I'm a little too old and a little too inoculated by having read a fair bit of Harlan Ellison for this series to really hit me where I live, but it ( Read more... )

I love long-form book reviews, otherwise known as book review essays: a well-written one, liberally stocked with well-chosen quotations from the work or works under consideration, can really give you a sense of whether a particular book is worth your time, energy, and, perhaps, money.

This week's issue of The New Yorker (the October 15 issue, ( Read more... )

I've been reading the two trade paperbacks collecting the first 16 issues of Volume 1 of The Authority, Wildstorm's (an imprint of DC Comics) superhero offshoot of Stormwatch (which I've not read yet); The Authority was first written by Warren Ellis (who, despite having read the first four TPs collecting his Transmetropolitan series, I've yet to ( Read more... )

I recently finished reading, thanks to inter-library loans, Brian Azzarello's run on Hellblazer, the still-running DC comic book featuring the trenchcoated Liverpudlian iconoclastic magician, John Constantine.

As much as I dug Azzarello's 100 Bullets series for DC's Vertigo imprint (which Hellblazer shares, or shared; which is why Constantine ( Read more... )

Owing to my frustration with the current novel I'm reading (one of L. Sprague de Camp's five historical novels, The Arrows of Hercules [1965]; let me hasten to add, however, that my frustration isn't with the text but rather with the copy of the mass market paperback edition [from 1970] that I have: the binding is disintegrating, the pages are in ( Read more... )

The full page ad in the front of the April issue of Harper's reminded me of another recent addition to my list of booklusts.

The formidable Michiko Kakutani gave the latest novel of Edward St. Aubyn, At Last (published in 2011 in the UK, but published in the U.S. this year) -- which the author at present says is the fifth and concluding ( Read more... )